Choosing Your Roll: Consonants or Vowels?

Before every roll you choose one of three calls: a consonant and a vowel, two consonants, or two vowels. It is the only decision in WyldTyle that shapes what the dice can give you, and most players make it badly. Here is the number that fixes it, and the method built on top.

The fourteen-vowel board

We counted the vowels in every playable word in the WyldTyle dictionary. Here is the average number of A, E, I, O, or U in a word of each length:

Add up the eight slots on a board (2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, and 7 letters) and a board of typical words holds about 14 vowels out of 38 letters, a little over a third. Now look at what the rolls deliver. Nineteen consonant-and-vowel calls hand you nineteen vowels. That is five more than the board wants, and those five have to go somewhere.

This is why "roll consonant-and-vowel every time, it's balanced" is wrong. It is not balanced. It is vowel-heavy, and a player who follows it ends most games stuffing extra As and Os into words that did not want them.

The baseline: about five two-consonant calls

To land near fourteen vowels, a game needs roughly fourteen consonant-and-vowel rolls and five two-consonant rolls, with zero two-vowel rolls. That is the baseline before you look at your board at all. Two-vowel rolls are a correction for when things have gone wrong, not part of the normal rhythm.

Wilds complicate this slightly, since a wild can become anything, but there are only about three per game and they usually go where a consonant was needed anyway.

A turn-by-turn method

The baseline tells you the mix across a game. Each turn, the board tells you which call to make now. Before you roll:

1. Count the vowels each open word still needs. Use the table above. A six-letter word wants about two; if it has one and three empty slots, it needs one more vowel and two more consonants.
2. Add them up across the board. You now know how many vowels and how many consonants your open slots want in total.
3. Call the roll that matches the bigger shortfall. Need eight consonants and three vowels? Call two consonants. Need five of each? Consonant-and-vowel. Need more vowels than consonants? That is rare, but it is what two-vowel is for.

In practice the count drifts toward "too many vowels" from about turn eight onward, and the disciplined player starts calling two consonants there.

Adjustments for what you actually hold

• A stranded rare consonant. If you have a K sitting in a six-letter slot with nothing around it, that word needs vowels next to the K before it needs more consonants. Bias toward vowels for a turn or two, even if the board-wide count says otherwise.
• The late game. From turn fifteen, stop counting averages and count exact needs. If your three remaining open slots are all vowel positions in near-finished words, call two vowels without hesitation. If they are all consonant positions, call two consonants. The last four turns are where two-vowel calls earn their place.
• Vowel quality. E is 30% of vowel rolls and fits almost anywhere. U is 10% and is the hardest to place. If you specifically need an E, a consonant-and-vowel call gives you a 30% shot; a two-vowel call gives you a 51% chance of at least one. That is the strongest argument for two-vowel outside the endgame.

Common mistakes

• Never calling two consonants. The most common error, and the one this page exists to fix. Five extra vowels is a lot to absorb.
• Calling two consonants too early. On turn one every slot is empty and every word wants vowels in its middle. The first three or four turns should nearly always be consonant-and-vowel.
• Calling two vowels to chase points. U is worth 3, A, I, and O are worth 2, but a vowel dropped into a word that did not need it is still a mistake. Vowels are structure, not score.

When the count goes wrong anyway, the vowel-heavy word list and the vowel-free word list are the rescue.